WHY COTTON CLOTH IS SCARCE
When I got on the train to leave Russia for the United States the first
familiar face I saw was that of Mr. Daniel Cheshire, mill owner and
operator of Petrograd. “I’m going home to England to enlist,” he said,
as we shook hands.
“What have you done with your mills?” I asked.
“I have left them to the Tavarishi,” replied Mr. Cheshire, “I thought I
might as well.”
Daniel Cheshire is not the only large manufacturer who has abandoned
his business after a vain struggle to cope with the situation created
by the Russian revolution, and the taking over by the working people
of the control of industry. Others have given up the struggle, and
many more will probably follow their example. But Mr. Cheshire’s
story I know at first hand. His abandonment of his mills is full
of significance, partly because of the importance of his branch of
manufacturing, and partly because his act may hasten the day when,
through sheer lack of the necessities of life, the Russian people will
cease pursuing their utopian dream and will content themselves with a
government which, although still capitalistic, will rescue them from
starvation and ruin.
Those who think of Russia as a land of snow and ice will be interested
to learn that in Turkestan and Transcaucasia as well as in other
provinces of the south and east, they raise millions of pounds of very
good cotton, the seeds of which originally came from America. Those
who think that every Russian peasant does nothing but farm will be
surprised to hear that over a million Russians work in textile mills,
principally cotton textiles.
When cotton spinning and weaving began in Russia the mill owners, in
most cases, sent to England for their foremen and managers, and the
descendants of some of these Englishmen still live and still manage
cotton mills in Russia. The Cheshire family is a case in point. The
original Cheshire went out from Manchester in the 1840’s to manage a
small cotton spinning factory in Petrograd. He saved money, bought
a partnership and enlarged the business. His sons enlarged it still
more, and to-day his grandchildren own and operate ten large cotton
mills in and around Petrograd. Daniel Cheshire, a keen young man
of thirty-something, is head of the family and chief owner of the
mills. That is, he was up to February, 1917. After that he wasn’t.
The Tavarishi, or “comrades,” whose wages he paid, became the virtual
owners then, and on August 30, 1917, they became, temporarily at least,
the sole owners.
It was in one of the Cheshire cotton mills that I got the most intimate
view of what becomes of industry when the workers own their tools.
Perhaps it would be fairer to say, when the workers seize their tools.
Some day, perhaps, they will find out how to own them honestly and
then they will use them wisely and for the common good.
It was a happy accident that first led me into a Cheshire cotton
mill. After being refused permission to inspect the big munition
works to which I applied--refused by the workers’ committee, not by
the proprietors--I wandered through the Viborg district of Petrograd
until I found another large factory. This time the permit given me by
the Minister of Labor worked better, and I was shown into the general
office of the plant. It was a big, modern, up-to-date office, furnished
with the usual desks, files, safes and the like, but to remind me
that I was in revolutionary Russia, the walls were decorated with
many red flags, and banners inscribed with white-lettered mottoes and
declarations. The head of the workmen’s committee, who came forward to
meet me, looked a little doubtful about letting me go through the mill,
but just then the door opened and a strapping young Englishman came in.
“See the works?” said he. “Of course you may. I’d like nothing better
than to show my mills just now to newspaper people. I call them my
mills yet, but only for a joke.”
He said something in Russian to the workman, who shrugged his shoulders
and stood aside, and Mr. Cheshire and I went into the nearest mill
room. It was a storeroom, as a matter of fact, the receiving room for
the huge bales of coarse yarn spun in another mill. The bales were
soft and made excellent beds, a fact that was not overlooked, for two
tired Russian mill-workers reposed blissfully on a pile of bales as we
passed through, sleeping the sleep of the just. They were not the only
sleepers I saw in that mill. Several women were taking naps on piles
of cloth near their machines, and a great many of the workers, men and
women, might as well have been asleep, for they were doing no work. One
woman was displaying a new pair of shoes to a group of other women, who
stopped their machines to look. Shoes are so expensive in Russia at
present that a new pair is worth looking at, I admit, but they might
have postponed the exhibition until closing time. These women stood and
discussed the shoes, from every point of view, apparently, nor did they
go back to their machines when we stopped and discussed the women.
“Do you mean to tell me that you cannot order them back to their work?”
I asked.
“Oh, I can order them,” was the reply. “But if they choose not to go
that would make me look rather foolish, wouldn’t it?”
“You could discharge them, couldn’t you?” I countered.
“I certainly could not,” declared Mr. Cheshire. “Nobody can discharge
an employé until the shop committee has sat on the case and decided
that it does not want the man or woman in the mill. All I can do is to
make my complaints to the committee and ask it to act.”
Mr. Cheshire was born in Russia, and has lived there all his life
except for a few years spent in an English school. Yet he speaks the
English of his grandfather, the same unmistakable little Lancashire
burr. He has the Lancastrian’s sense of humor also and he laughed even
when he told me of the demoralization and ruin in which the fantasies
of the revolution had plunged his business. The utter absurdity of it
was as present in his mind as the disaster.
“Look at that man,” he said, pointing to a machine at which a man sat
and wound cotton cloth into huge round cylinders. “He and the others at
his particular job have had their wages raised to sixteen rubles (about
$5.25) a day. Yes, of course. The committee decides on the wage scale.
I am not consulted. Even if I were, I should have nothing except a
complimentary vote, one against hundreds. That chap gets sixteen rubles
a day, and in addition I must hire a girl at four rubles a day to lift
the roll of cloth off the machine.”
We passed into a print room still discussing the committee. I asked Mr.
Cheshire if it was true that these workmen’s committees were highly
paid men who performed no service to their employers and still received
their regular pay.
“It is true,” he replied. Then he went on to tell me the following
story: “The work we do in this room is something a little unusual in
Russia. Few mills have these machines as yet, and our product is almost
the only cotton goods of the kind possible to buy in Russian markets
since the war. Before that a great deal of it was imported from England
and Germany. Naturally it is scarce at present, and not long ago one
of our men complained that he couldn’t buy it at all. ‘Of course you
cannot,’ I told him, ‘because these mills are turning out very little
of it. Go into the print room and see for yourself how many machines
are idle for lack of workers.’ And then I made him this offer, for he
was a member of the committee: ‘Let me have four men of your committee
back to work on these machines, and I will guarantee that you will soon
be able to buy the goods you want.’ Well, he agreed, and he got the
rest of the committee to agree, and I got the men back. But what do you
think those four men demanded? They said that they had been doing hard
mental work on the committee for two months, and they thought before
they went back to the machines they ought to have a month’s vacation
with pay. I did draw the line there. I told them I’d close the works
first. But since then I understand that the committee has begun to
discuss the two months on and one month off as a future policy. They
say that mental work--they call committee meetings mental work--is much
harder than physical labor.”
“I’m glad they are finding it out,” I remarked. “Perhaps after a while
they will discover that even you belong to the proletariat.”
“If they raise the wages again,” said Mr. Cheshire, “I mean to ask them
to give me a job. I’ll have to. Then they’ll have some real mental work
finding out how to pay me or themselves either. This factory and all
the others in our name have been running farther and farther behind
for months. Soon we shall have to close. We should have been closed
before now except that we hoped that a strong government would be
formed and industry as well as the army and navy would be placed under
a dictatorship.”
The committees have created an eight-hour day in this particular
industry. Some industries have a six-hour day, and I was told that
numbers of working people claimed that a two-hour day was the ideal
towards which they aspired. I heard also, on good authority, that
certain groups favored a complete cessation of all factory work during
the three hot months of summer.
Mr. Cheshire’s mills were supposed to run eight hours a day, but he
declared that he would be satisfied, in present circumstances, to get
a good, solid five hours’ work out of his people. If they would stay
on the job and actually produce for five hours every working day he
thought he might avert bankruptcy. “We close at five,” he told me. “But
along about 4 o’clock you watch them begin to go home.”
I watched and they did. Man after man and woman after woman stopped all
work and began to put on their shoes. Many millworkers work barefooted.
They gathered in little knots at a window and looked out, talking
aimlessly. They strolled about the rooms. Some just stopped work and
went out. At half past four in the rooms through which I walked, not
half the machines were running.
“Is it really like this in all the mills and factories of Russia?” I
asked, “or is this mill an exception to the rule? Is it worse than the
average?”
“It is no worse than most,” was the reply. “It is better than some.
Industrial Russia has completely broken down in some places. It is
rapidly breaking down everywhere.”
What I saw afterwards absolutely confirmed this statement. The
industrial world is as much in the hands of the Bolsheviki or
extremists as are the councils of workmen’s and soldiers’ delegates.
While the provisional government of the early weeks of the revolution
discussed ways and means whereby the workers in mills and factories
might gradually acquire an interest in their industries and a voice in
the councils of the managers, the workers settled the whole thing by
turning the employers out and taking over the industries themselves.
They have voted themselves enormous salaries, short hours and little
work. But they have done little or nothing to insure the permanence
of the salaries. Soon there will be, instead of an eight hour day, no
working day at all. All the shops and factories will close.
In Moscow is the largest and finest department store in Russia. It is
an English concern, Muir & Merrilies, managed and largely owned by Mr.
William L. Cazalet. I know him well, and his testimony, when I saw him
in August, bore out this statement. The committee in Muir & Merrilies
voted that they found it inconvenient to have clerks and other employés
go home for lunch at different hours. They therefore ordered the store
closed every day from 12 to 2 o’clock. The store was accordingly closed.
“I don’t mind,” said Mr. Cazalet cheerfully. “My stocks are running
low, the transportation system is on the verge of collapse, and I can’t
get any more goods. As each line of goods is exhausted I shall close
the department. When the time comes I shall close the store and go home
to England for a vacation.”
He will go, as Daniel Cheshire went, others will follow, and the
workers will own their tools. They won’t own anything else.